Celebration in the Laboratory

This photo installation, ‘Celebration in the Laboratory’, celebrates some of the contributors who have made Indian modern and contemporary art, significant. These candid portraits of different people (many of them friends), depicts my personal view of the Indian art scene exactly like a large joint family.

I allowed this installation an alarming subjectivity in my choices in the making and showing of photographs, opening up options of great freedom. The informal aesthetic comes with a very democratic everyday usage of the digital camera which all of us are becoming so familiar with. The ease which it allows the photographer, matches the easy opening out that it allows the models. The faces, so many familiar to ‘the art world’ and yet not so familiar to the general public, should create a unique tension and a mysterious narrative for the viewer in general. The photographs are individual, and yet they connect to each other in their actions or their metaphors. The space, this abandoned laboratory, with its peeling plaster and happy, well-travelled sea breeze, becomes an appropriate background to these players, all part of the ongoing project that is contemporary Indian Art.